Retrospective Technological Mythmaking: Media Discourses of Furby and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Recent articles suggesting the late-1990s animatronic children’s toy, Furby, was promoted and perceived as true Artificial Intelligence in 1998-99 are not wholly accurate. In examining 130 North American news stories, Furby is often accurately described as only imitating machine learning. This paper analyses these articles from the perspective of mythmaking in technological culture. In the article, I analyse the media discourses at the time and provide their historical context within North American technological culture, containing events such as the Y2K bug, popular media representations, and the dotcom bubble. I also describe several potent emotional reactions to Furby. However, recent media discourses suggest Furby had been perceived as a panic-inducing new technology, similar to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast and silent cinema train effect, both of which historians have largely discounted. I contribute evidence to the contrary, while acknowledging emotional reactions, which are not necessarily indicators of utopian or dystopian cultural panics, but instead a technological banal. The contemporary mythmaking about Furby is situated as comparable to Foucault’s analysis of myths of Victorian prudishness and silence around sexuality. Retroactive mythmaking risks supporting uncritical perspectives in the present, warranting interrogation of myths about AI as it develops and expands.